Judging Difference
by Missed Nin
Summary: In another life, Shikamaru was born the day the Kyuubi attacked. In another life, the Chuunin exams went very differently. Team Ten. Naruto. Gaara. The Nara family. Let them fight. Let them question. Shikamaru, it's time to prove yourself to the world.


This is a rewriting of Indifference, my epic about an AU Naruto-verse with Shikamaru as the Kyuubi's host. It'll have less pretentious writing than the original, but the same story – with extra scenes and longer chapters. Here's the mission statement for the fic: _as far as I know, there are no AU stories where the person that the Kyuubi was sealed in stays with their actual family. I wanted to write one._

Naruto and all the characters and concepts thereof are the intellectual property of Kishimoto Masashi. Since I am not him, Naruto is not in any way mine.

* * *

**Judging Difference.**

* * *

Nara Shikamaru had come close to not being wanted. His father lost a leg to the Demon Fox, and lost all the idealism he'd had left along with it. When the now crippled jounin found out what had happened to his newborn son, horror shattered his Nara logic. He couldn't find compassion for the baby. For five hellish days while he suffered, he wanted nothing more than to kill the – _creature_ – that young Shikamaru had been sacrificed for.

* * *

Nara Yoshino, new mother, was never formally discharged from the too-busy hospital; around an hour after the Kyuubi's defeat (but still before she could stand up with steady legs), she was escorted – half-carried - home by a pitying nurse who nonetheless didn't want to look at or touch _that child._

The Nara wife was glad to leave: even the maternity ward had been needed for shinobi wounded fighting the Kyuubi. The civilian portion of the population had been evacuated, thankfully, but the hospital had been overfull and nightmarish. The contrast between that place and the deserted streets was surreal. Like the whole situation: it was all fucking surreal. It was all crazy and she wanted a chance to scream about it, to break down and not have to hang on to the fake strained calm she'd mastered. But she wasn't breaking down, she was – maturely, responsibly – leaving early to leave her hospital bed free for a dying man. She wasn't in state to do that and be sent home alone, but then nor were all those dying defenders of their village, so _she would cope_.

Deciding that (while shifting her weight to free one hand from holding the baby and open her door, quite a feat even for the agile) was the hardest thing she'd done since – well, _fuck_ - permitting Yondaime-sama to take Shikamaru in the first place. Damn it all. But she was going to cope. Her escort ought to go help someone who needed it. So she got the door open and then quite deliberately stood so the nurse couldn't get in. The little-girl nurse needed to go back to her hospital, and she said so. She needed to go help those wounded idiots who'd been noble enough to fight despite being of no use whatsoever against that monster. They were now dying. Dying because they'd tried to help against all the odds. There are people dying; just go!

The nurse was young and scared, her round blonde face was worried and expressive. Only a silly girl, but this silly girl didn't want to leave a desperate – doubtless irrational – woman alone. Yoshino wondered what her real motives were: she looked too young to have kids, perhaps she was still too young to go back to a building filled with people dying.

It doesn't matter. Yoshino thought about telling the girl _she_ was too young, too. Too young to let her baby boy be taken away by a desperate hero.

But she didn't. She shut the door on the worried nurse-girl, and she waited. Eventually, footsteps receded down the path. Yoshino slid down against the door, feeling herself fade out of consciousness for about thirty blissful seconds until her three-year-old daughter Rumiko appeared to see her new brother. She sustained her effort to stay awake: if the kids heard her swear, it hardly mattered in the long term.

* * *

On October the fourteenth, four days later, Yoshino brought the boy they'd been meaning to call Shikamaru to see his father. Shikaku wasn't in immediate danger, so he'd been sent to a makeshift hospital; it was the house of a dead family. Mattresses on the floor made up hospital beds in what had been the family's main room: pictures of a broadly grinning boy in various stage of life looked down on them. Shikaku turned his head away from his visitors, unable to look at his wife or what he was trying to think of as _her_ _baby_. He found himself meeting the photographic eyes of a proud mother; another picture showed the now-genin child holding his baby sister.

Shikaku lowered his head and stared down at his bedclothes. He didn't care about looking petulant.

The other invalids of the room were awkwardly silent: perhaps embarrassed, perhaps disgusted at this perversion of a domestic scene. An inhuman baby and a baggy-eyed mother in some other family's room. A father acting like a child and crippled like a useless beast.

Long moments passed, and Yoshino shifted the baby in her arms and bit out that _this is my child, Shikaku._

And even though it took all her strength and willpower, she walked home without meeting anyone's eyes in the partly repopulated streets. She didn't stop or cry.

* * *

When Shikaku returned home the lean-to housing and tents that returning refugees had put up were in a new stage of life: construction workers busied themselves around them, repairing and building. The streets weren't even nearly normal, but they were full again. He walked in awkwardly with a cane to find Rumiko playing with the baby and the old cot and toys removed from the loft.

Shikaku didn't protest, but he offered no welcome to his son. Welcome? It was him coming back home, the child had been in place longer than him, now. He was grim and silent as he adjusted to life with one less limb, usual Nara apathy sinking dangerously towards depression as the village dragged itself back together into some semblance of functionality. To the dismay of the now-reinstated Sandaime, he turned down a place on the village's council of shinobi. He couldn't have taken it; he hated the puerile, petty gossiping the community was filled with. Crises were meant to draw people together, not divide them, not provoke power-grabbing or clan elitism.

He and his old genin team, Akimichi Chouza and Yamanaka Inoshi, were supportive of each other in a way they hadn't been since they'd married; the Akimichi was likely to never quite recover from chakra-pathway burns and he veered dangerously between weights without the ability to regulate his metabolism with chakra. Inoshi had become strange: austere, unreadable, blank, as if he wanted to seem strong in the crisis. He did seem strong, to a certain extent; Inoshi firmly steered Shikaku out of bars before he could fall into alcoholism. But his wife worried, and his team-mates didn't understand. All three avoided mention of the others' problems.

Shikaku had been avoiding home since the the attack on Konoha. Whenever came back, it was a chaotic mess, the baby dominating the house and Yoshino's attention. His wife had quit her job. Eventually, without discussing it with her, he started work again himself, classifying and assigning missions.

* * *

As Shikamaru learned to crawl, Shikaku's couldn't help turning his analytical skills on his family. For the first time, he noticed how Yoshino had changed. She swore more nowadays. The defensive mask she wore as she and her son faced the community had carved lines into her face. He hadn't looked at how Inoshi's wife took the now four-year-old Rumiko to nursery for her, or how apprehensive Yoshino had become in the face of the public. His wife had never been one for passivity, but his coldness and the village's suspicion had reduced her to a perpetual chagrin. Before, the idea of an end to her nagging would have been welcome, but now their silence sat awkwardly in the house. He began to help with housework, still leaving his wife as Shikamaru's sole carer-giver.

At the first year anniversary of the Kyuubi no Kitsune's fall, Shikaku didn't attend the memorial for the dead. He sat hunched and brooding in his favourite cloud-watching spot, noticing but not watching the funeral fires and the eerie lighting of the sunset, muffled through the clouds. He did not allow himself to recline. To anyone who knew him, this showed that he was agitated. His profile was sharp; his thoughts fixated on one matter rather than following the meandering, nebulous patterns of the clouds.

* * *

When Shikaku returned to the house late on the night of October the 10th, Yoshino half expected him to be drunk in commemoration. Her husband's distance frustrated and hurt her, but he undeniably had a case for seeing himself as wronged by fate. To Yoshino's eyes, he was more willing to carry on with life now, after a year, and that was good. She was pleased for him. But she still couldn't communicate with him: his Nara passivity had turned into an unbreakable reticence. The only conversation in their house was between her and the children.

It was lonely. A sharp-minded adult, and she was shut up alone with her kids.

It could have been worse, though. She'd been conscious of the division of their family since claiming Shikamaru as '_her'_ child. Calling him _'ours'_, she still thinks, would have started a real argument, and she couldn't decide whether that would have been a good thing – it could have resolved the issue – or a terrible one. It could well have broken them both too far down. Broken down everything between them and broken them up.

The Nara family is a broken home: we live in the same house, but we're separate in it. When Shikaku's home, he doesn't say anything much even to Rumiko. We're all alone in our home, trapped with each other but still pretty far apart. You can't find a target for the blame here. That it happened on that night were enough: so many other people died, so much else was destroyed, so few people were unscathed. All we can do is call ourselves victims: victimising each other would be a feeble gesture, if you only thought back to the real forces that made the decisions and gave out the wounds. Still, not finding fault is difficult: Yoshino sees herself as a brittle creature, constantly suppressing the emotions and accusations that would damage the household's stability.

On the night of the anniversary, she's more fragile than ever. Shikaku returns unannounced, but she's been sitting up half-waiting for it, knowing today would strain his tolerance. It strained hers.

She was in the kitchen, where'd been since putting the children to bed. She'd ran out of chores, moving on to drinking tea to justify staying there, and she'd brewed another pot and sat back down at the table when she heard the door open. That she didn't hear any movements after the door's creak was a relief – being married to a shinobi, silent motion was familiar, loud signified loss of control. Only having lived here and with him for so long let her notice his arrival at all.

She didn't turn round, just waited. He came to join her, pouring himself a cup of tea and refilling hers. She curled her fingers round the cup and looked at his face, which was deeply sombre. Silence and the sounds of animals and fireworks outside. She thought his face looked calm.

He drank his tea and poured himself another cup before speaking. She knew he was serious when he met her eyes.

"I knew from the start it would be unjust to hate Shikamaru."

It was a tone he used to report facts, not to discuss them. It was a confident Nara voice, one that she found herself smiling to hear, knowing this kind of confidence hadn't been addressed to her in a year.

But he looked back down again, maybe ashamed and maybe struggling with himself. He always had found confessions difficult.

"I've only tolerated him. I should... do more than that. I owe Rumiko more than that." And this was the painful part of it. This was him asking her to trust him again – he told her: "I'll try."

As proclamations went, it lacked something. But it was at that moment the separate inhabitants of the Nara household began to bring their paths together again.


End file.
